Great Ormond Street Hospital (GOSH) is a specialist children's hospital providing state-of-the-art management and research in paediatric conditions.
With an emphasis on serious and rare disorders, the hospital is not an appropriate choice if you wish to learn about general paediatrics or neonatology. Similarly, as we do not have a casualty department, you will not have the opportunity to learn about paediatric accident and emergency.
However, GOSH is an excellent choice if you are seeking further experience of specialties dealing with tertiary conditions. Please bear in mind that although some departments do follow patients into adulthood, the majority only deal with children aged up to 18.
Role and responsibilities
One of the main aims of student attachments is to learn about clinical paediatrics. It is therefore essential that you are allowed to:
- talk to parents
- examine patients
- gain access to results and investigations
You will be supervised by a responsible clinician or consultant to make sure you do not engage in any activity beyond your level of competence or pose a risk to the child, parents or other team members.
However, you will be permitted to:
- take a history from children and their parents
- examine children
- access written and computerised patient records
- observe procedures
- attend investigations
- present patients on the ward round and/or clinical meetings and discuss patient details with other members of the team
- review additional patient information for audit, research or other official projects
You must therefore:
- Respect patient consent and confidentiality at all times. In particular, you should be careful not to have clinical-related discussions outside designated medical areas.
- Be aware of and adhere to GOSH policies, particularly regarding child protection and child safety within the hospital and their specialty areas. You should make your supervisor aware of any issues as a matter of urgency.
- Inform the team immediately of new health or probity issues that may affect your dealings with children, parents or other team members.
For more information, please read the
Medical students’ roles and responsibilities at Great Ormond Street Hospital (Word doc, 1.2MB).
Potential areas for your placement
Students can apply to the following paediatric departments:
How to apply
The elective application process is now closed for spring and summer 2013.
If you wish to apply for a placement from October 2013 onwards, please do not submit an application before June 2013 as it will not be reviewed prior to this date.
Fees and charges
Please be aware that all official visitors to GOSH need to be registered and approved before they can gain access to the hospital. You will need to undergo the same Criminal Records Bureau (CRB) checks and occupational health checks as our paid employees.
It can take many weeks to obtain CRB clearance. This time is beyond our control and you will not be allowed on the wards until these checks are completed.
An administration fee is charged to process these checks. Download the document for our charging scheme (Word doc, 1.2MB).
For more information, please contact:
- Lindsey Levy, PGME Manager, 0207 4059 200 (ext 5420)
- Anne Mills, Honorary Contract Co-ordinator, 0207 4059 200 (ext 5463)
